


winter child

by killkissbe



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Cult
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 18:08:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20412079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killkissbe/pseuds/killkissbe
Summary: Winter is pregnant.





	winter child

**Author's Note:**

> _So dear child, my child,_  
_Has it been so long since you could force a smile?_  
_Sore state, long face,_  
_You are wondering if it's right to leave this place._  
_Winter Child_, Matt Duke
> 
> For L, again, without who I might never think these fucked up things. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Winter is pregnant.

She finds out too late to just swallow a pill and bleed the thing away – an act that would get her killed by her beloved brother, probably – because she’d done her best to forget the possibility altogether after Kai had snuck into her bedroom the night of the “ritual” wearing a mask and come inside her.

The first thing she does is endless research, trying to figure out if the creature growing inside her even has a chance of survival only to learn that the closer the relation, the lesser the chance of deformities. Thank God for small favors, she thinks, and for absolutely nothing else.

She doesn’t dare go a clinic or even just a regular doctor, knowing how quickly Kai would figure out what’s going on and how excited he’d be for his prodigy. She doesn’t tell a dare tell a single soul, either, because she’s learned quickly that there’s no one she can trust in this world, no matter how much she loves them.

And Winter _does_ love Kai, maybe with her whole heart, but she also hates him for all he’s put her through before _and_ after the election. She might have stuck by his side for her life's entirety in the same way he’d always stood by her, but she’s not as blind like his army of followers –and she doesn’t believe herself when she tells the women that he’d never hurt her.

It’s funny that, she thinks, love and hate and how closely the two are intertwined. The most fine line. She feels the same way for the life blooming inside her: the strongest affection she’s ever felt, a loyalty greater than the one she holds for her brother and yet an absolute resentment for its very existence.

She thinks it over a thousand times in head, whether she could convince Kai to let her go out of town to recruit or some bullshit, find some underground butcher to do the abortion, but she knows if he didn’t sniff out the lie that one of his crew just as quickly would – especially with how quickly the days are slipping into weeks and how soon her small frame will have her showing.

She’s more scared than she’s ever been, and that’s really saying something. But she’s also never had a greater need, a greater _reason_, to leave, and that’s what has her on a bus to Nowhere, MO, breathless for the running, looking out the window through her disguise to see if one of them has managed to follow.

* * *

Winter picks Missouri because it makes her laugh the way the woman at the counter says it - like "_misery"_ – and hasn’t she spent her whole life there, anyway? 

She starts her new life in a shitty motel that only asks for her first name and a hundred dollar bill as a deposit. It takes her a moment to figure out _who_ she is, now, after a lifetime of being one of the fucked up clan of Andersons. "Sarah Bloom," she tells the receptionist, with the hope that her new life won’t be quite so cold and maybe something decent will blossom with it.

She gets a job at a Price Chopper before they can turn her down for being pregnant, and even then it’s only because she gets on her knees in the back room and promises more later. She hates the man responsible for her hiring with a familiar, familial vengeance and finds herself missing Kai as she curls into herself at night, thinking about how he’d kill him if he knew. If only he knew.

But she only has herself, now. Even if other people try, like the kindly old woman who eats lunch with her and gives her a knowing wink as she remarks about eating for two long before Winter’s had time or confidence or even care to disclose her condition. The woman, Loretta, asks her if she wants it to be a boy or a girl and it’s been so long since she cried but Winter still finds herself blinking back tears as she tries to figure out which would be worse if she was back with her brother.

Everything comes back to him, over and over again, and she finds herself staring at the cracked screen of the phone that she’d destroyed when she left and wishing more than anything that she could reach out to him. Tell him. Make him come and get her and do whatever it takes to get back on his good side.

Of course, she’s not an idiot, and so instead Winter makes do with the life she’s leading now, going into work 9-5 and sometimes sucking her boss’s cock and getting more and more pregnant without it feeling like any time has passed at all. She finally dares to go to a doctor and finds out she’s having a girl, a _healthy_ girl, and she makes the technician check each and every feature twice, just in case.

She has no birth plan, no money and knows a motel is no place to raise a baby – hell, they’ll kick her out for the noise alone – but she finally starts to accept that maybe there _is_ an okay for her, here, somehow, that maybe even if she’s always going to be struggling to find her way, it didn’t have to be _his_ way.

That maybe she made the right choice.

In the spring, her baby is born backward and comes out blue but breathing once the doctors have had a few moments with her, and when they lift her into Winter’s arms she kisses her damp little head and cries against her dark hair, promising a better life than her parents gave her. She’s spent her whole life craving pain, hurting herself, that it seems impossible that something so perfect could be born of it – let alone of _them_.

There aren’t any visitors except for Loretta and a representative of the local church who promises that she’ll pray for the both of them, there aren’t any flowers and there’s definitely not any trumpet call to signify the birth of the Kai's Messiah, but even in her – in _Eliza’s_ – cries, Winter finds comfort, finally accepting that something good has come of her life and maybe that’s enough penance for all the fucked up shit she’d done in that strange lifetime of hers forever ago.

* * *

Eliza is two months old and Winter’s rocking her close when a newsflash comes on the television and there’s Kai’s face, hair blue as ever, with a headline about him being shot in the head and dying of the wounds immediately. Maybe it should come as a shock, maybe it should break her, but the only thing that has her heart now is looking up at her with piercing eyes and she knows that truly, unlike everybody else in her life, she will never hurt her.


End file.
